Tax and Tax, Spend and Spend, Get the Boot

[Valin]

Contentions:

John Steele Gordon
03.16.2011

Mayor Carlos Alvarez of Miami-Dade County Florida lost a recall election yesterday, and it wasn’t close. He lost his job with 88 percent of the voters against him. (In 2003, Governor Gray Davis of California was recalled by a vote of only 55 percent.)

Although Miami has been especially hard hit by the meltdown in property values in recent years, Alvarez pushed through a 14 percent property-tax increase and then gave public employees fat salary increases in contract negotiations. He also championed a new baseball stadium publicly funded at the cost of $600 million, despite 12 percent unemployment in the area.

This election, I think, is just more evidence that the famous formula for political success, first enunciated by FDR’s close aide Harry Hopkins, “tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect,” is no longer operative.......(Snip)